Thursday, August 24, 2006

Between Tsunami and Katrina

My newsfeed pointed me to this news on New Orleans a year after Katrina. So I wondered: What did BBC write about Aceh one year on? A quick search on the BBC site, and I found this news. See the difference in tone? And all this, despite the Americans' advantage of not having to broker a peace deal in the region while dealing with reconstruction.

Though to be fair, we did get lots of help, including from the Americans. But most of all, intense public scrutiny (from within and without) was key to the progress in Aceh reconstruction – in part due to internationally-brokered peace accord in Aceh.

6 Comments:

Arya,

I was looking at http://nalarekonomi.blogspot.com/ and saw Abdulrahman Wahid under the section of "Liberal Indonesia".

I am not quite sure the definition of "Liberal Indonesia". In the world of politic Liberal is often connotated to something negative and has been used successfully by politician to discredit others. In some dictionary, it meant "Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogma".

Mr. Wahid is holding a true principle of Islam --non violence and posses highest tolerance toward non Moslem. In that sense he is a true progressive Moslem Indonesian and he's certainly not an extremist nor a liberal.

You can check a copy of his recent writing to WSJ on http://smak1-1985.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_smak1-1985_archive.html under the title of "True Islam vs. Wrong Islam".

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I am a student in economics. This is not to say that I'm only interested in money supply, interest rates, or exchange rates. We care about all of the things that non-economists care about - we just see them in a unique way. I am also an Indonesian - which also doesn't mean I only care about Indonesian affairs. I was just born that way.